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Andrea Courey
—in search of why

Divorced with three children and no child support, Andrea Courey not only found the inner strength and focus to succeed as a small business owner, she became Woman Entrepreneur of the Year in 2007!

Andrea has always been reflective about life, so when she embarked on her own business it was natural for her to ask, "Why am I doing this?" In this episode of Mindful Lives she shows how that question became the backbone of her will to succeed. Listen to her inspiring story here.

“One of the most difficult things I had to deal with was to get to work early every morning, leave late every night and know that the sun had risen, had made it all the way through the sky, and had set, and I had missed the sun that day.”

Chris Cawley –
the contemplative entrepreneur

Chris Cawley is not your typical meditator. He’s an entrepreneur who honed his advertising skills in Ireland and the USA, and seems to have learned more about corporate culture than he bargained for. He’s a great fan of the TV show Mad Men, and has remarked on how authentic it feels.

In this candid interview Chris talks about the evolution of his thought and the role of meditation in his life, including creative process & innovation as well as social & political thought.

Referenced in this podcast:
Capital in the Twenty First Century
by Thomas Piketty

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin

ADFX Awards 2016

The Future

worldWhen you think about it, homo sapiens cuts a tragi-comic figure. We're an excessive number of hyper-organised dressed-up apes mismanaging an incredibly diverse ecosystem that's worked fine without our help for millions of years.

Once, before we were sapiens, our mission was the same as any other animal’s—merely to survive. Now, it's to get more and to be more—no matter what.

Did you know they’re even working on a cure for old age. Really! I suppose if they succeed there’ll be weird side-effects, but that’s not the only creepy thing. Imagine if people stopped dying. We'd have to start shipping them to other planets—eventually by the billions. We might even have the technology, but who's going to foot the bill? Besides, space ships are blowing up these days….

In general, I don't mind dying; once or twice when I was deathly ill I actually felt like letting go. On any other day though, I'd rather not. As for that cure they're working on, if it really could reverse arthritis and lengthen my telomeres I dare say I'd take it.

Ho-hum. One more paradox of being human. Cull the human race, but not me (or mine). We're far from being God's chosen; more like a scourge on the planet and on each other.

Now, just minutes before midnight some people are waking up to the dangers. Whether it's happening fast enough is another matter, but I'm going to hope we will—before it's too late—win over our somnambulant brothers and sisters and build a saner society. Who knows, we could even pretend we're on the same side.

The alternative isn't worth considering, since it includes our extinction. I mean, what’s the point of philosophy then?

We have to hope and try. Who else is going to?

The Advantages of Not Getting What You Want

When life is disappointing, don’t blame life. The problem is probably your expectations .

I was chatting the other day with a friend who’s coming up to 60. He said when he looks in the mirror he still sees his familiar youthful face, but when he sees snapshots of himself, he doesn’t recognize the aging man in the picture. It freaks him out.

I can relate.

zen_garden

So what do we expect? We're all getting older. Obvious, isn't it?

Somehow it doesn't feel obvious My teachers urged me to contemplate my death every day. I found this very hard—not because it was frightening; because it just didn’t seem real.

And that's what's weird. I knew I was going to die but in my heart I didn’t really believe it. We seemed programmed to resist reality, and that explains why aging is a shock to the system, no matter how long we've had to get used to it. It’s a sort of denial.

Daily meditation on death breaks through the cycle of expectation and disappointment. It doesn’t stop denial in its tracks, but it does enable us to work with it.

We expect to be happy in life. We don’t readly admit when we’re not. That’s why it’s hard to question our choice of career or whether we’re really happily married. At the same time, we know that qestioning is the honest thing to do. We resist self-questioning because of what we might find out, but sometimes all that needs to change is our perspective, not our whole life. By refusing to face our disappointments and the questions they raise we remain oblivious to necessary course corrections, and end up on the rocks.

This all boils down to working on ourselves. Buddha called this bhāvanā. It’s natural yet cultivated, more than just a technique, more than just following rules. It’s the art of life. It has to be you.

Finding out what that entails means being in the right place at the right time. There’s an element of luck, but also of dignity. In one sense, meditation is waiting on the moment. We need to contemplate life without dogma or expectation, with an open mind and a light touch. We need to persist without necessarily doing anything.

The art of life is subtle and hidden, but it’s not that far below the surface. It just takes a little digging.

 

What Do You Expect?

expectation

I’ve heard it said that kids today have an overblown sense of entitlement. I’m not sure it’s got anything to do with today. I grew up in the 1960s and felt very entitled. It comes, I suppose, from being born into a land of plenty, from taking for granted a square meal and a roof over your head. I also anticipated a life of meaningful and profitable prospects. Far from feeling just plain lucky, I considered it my right.

How could anyone in this fabulous country of Canada (there are many others) not grow up like this? Still, it’s not easy to change human nature. We take what we’ve got for granted. In other words, we’re born into expectation: the belief that we will or should achieve something.

Ideas have little power over human nature, but they do have a little. Having an idea doesn’t change a thing, but applying it consistently to the way we approach life does—gradually and profoundly. It’s what sets us apart from other animals. This is meditation—not sitting fashionably crossed-legged but sustaining an idea, massaging it and seeing it from different angles. You don’t need to be weird about it. You might be washing dishes, jogging or staring at passing clouds and still be meditating. Personally, that’s when I do it best.

When our expectations are defeated we feel overwhelmed, oppressed by something beyond our power. It creeps up on us when we’re lost in the gap between what we expect and what actually happens.

The power of meditation lies in exploring the gap between what we expect of life and what it delivers. No one is exempt from the pendulum swings of joy and despair, but we do love to think we are. Wishful thinking is as much in our nature as entitlement.

Entitlement feels good, but when our expectations are defeated we feel overwhelmed, oppressed by something beyond our power. It creeps up on us when we’re lost in the gap between what we expect and what actually happens.

We say life is overwhelming, but there’s no such person as ‘life;’ it’s just a way of speaking. And blaming ‘life’ for feeling overwhelmed is a cop out. Instead, we can see how our expectations set us up for disappointment, and then sustain that thought. That’s how a bit of reflection can seriously change the way we handle things. When the idea is translated into action, things move in new directions.

Caroline and I recently left our home of fourteen years and moved into a rental while our new house is being built. One delay after another has frayed our nerves, especially since the rental’s not at all adapted for Caroline’s MS. We feel overwhelmed every day, and we deal with it every day. On the whole, we balance each other out. When she’s ready to scream, I squeeze a smile out of her. When I’m ready to explode, she reminds me that I can handle it. The fact that we regularly put on our Quiet Mind Workshops helps keep our heads on straight.

This may not look like much, but to fine-tune your human nature you absolutely need a support system. We need people we believe in to remind us to believe in ourselves. We also need strategy and the guidance of an appropriate teacher. That might be a religious figure, a martial arts teacher or a coaching mentor. It all depends on who you relate to. The rest is a matter of practice.